I just shipped these greeting cards off to their new family, the proud folks over at Petit Collage in San Francisco. This card and the one following the jump are the first two in a new series of letterpress printed cards designed by Petit Collage for sale in their online store. Super tight registration on this one with some great detail and patterning (check out the reverse woodgrain), printed on sustainable bamboo paper (with  touch of cotton to help it feel supple). I love the eyes here—if you can check out the larger image, you’ll see that the negative round spaces that make the shape of the eyes are the letterpressly answer to googly eyes. Check out the Petit Collage site soon for these lovely cards and, hopefully, more to come soon.
Larger version of the owl card:

And the second card, a 1/0 menagerie:

Here are some fun cards we printed for Boulder-based wine company Scarpetta last Autumn. Scarpetta is the proprietary wine label of the owners of Frasca, one of the bright lights among Boulder’s eateries. These cards are simple and bold, employing the full field of the white card to imply poise and the utmost in quality. And it was a blast working with that illustration! The pig has such great linework that all of the minute detail really pops. Bleeding the pig off the left edge also helps encourage recipients to flip the card to get the contact info on the back side… where the colors also flip.

As these are printed on both sides, these cards presented the problem of conflicting impressions: the impression from one side threatened to interfere with the printing on the opposite side. To avoid this, we printed the front of the cards on one sheet of paper, then printed the back side of the card on another sheet, relying on extremely tight registration and placement. When the printing was complete, we then custom-duplexed the front side to the back side, then diecut the cards for precise and clean edging. All of which supports the crisp and direct flavors of this fantastic wine. Find some near you and enoy it on a warm afternoon—you’ll thank the pig you did so.

This invite is a favorite from last year. Simple and contemporary layout in a cool grey and popping light blue. Lotus petals, drawn by the couple, were incorporated on the invite and outer envelope. I like the contrast between the flower and the typography—without the flower, the layout would feel much more austere and direct with its right-justification and asymmetry. With the flower, there’s just the right amount of soul, I think, to balance out that austerity. Especially helpful is the fact that the petals are stylized, with clean lines rather than “natural,” jagged lines with internal veinwork and stems. This allows more light, more paper, to show through the artwork and really create an active, projective composition.The reply card is an interesting piece, too, as we designed it to serve a dual purpose: reply card & information card, achieved by making the card a bit taller and throwing down a perforation. When recipients received the invitation, all they had to do was tear off the info card, mark down their replies, and mail the card back to the couple, then save the tear-off card for the day of the wedding. This does create a dilemma for the recipient, though: what to do with the info card until wedding day? Maybe we should have included a leather pouch and handydandy thumbstring for memory purposes…

Next in the series of random things you might want in your quiver: a rather distressed ampersand. This particular specimen was letterpress printed and then scanned and cleaned up a bit. It comes from a font of old wood type that I’ve had for a while, and it has definitely seen better days… which makes it all the more interesting.

Click here to download a .zip file containing a high-resolution .tif, a .jpg, and an .eps of the image. Enjoy!

Soon after Alejandro Paul of Sudtipos type foundry released his typeface, Affair, I was dying to use it in an invitation layout as it seemed perfect for such an occasion. Upon finding a good fit, I soon learned how incredibly difficult it is to use it tastefully without going dizzy from all of the ornamentals.

For this invite, we read up on the local flora of Yosemite National Park, and found an illustration of pinecone indigenous to the area. This became the background for the invite and, in another iteration, the illustration for the outer envelope.

As the wedding was a weekend event and required guests to commit to travel and a few days’ stay, there were several events planned for everyone in attendance. The reply card was designed so that guests could indicate their participation in any of the several planned wedding-related events, while a schedule of events card highlighted the weekends main events, and incorporated custom illustrations as visual assits. And throughout each of the pieces, the script typeface continually works off of and accents the more formal and spare sans serif. Looking at this piece again after over two years, I was struck by how it felt both graceful and playful, which feels fitting given the awe-inspiring setting.

As with most things, the longer a completed job sits in my flat files, the more likely I am to not look at it very often. I’ve got several, however, that are worth pulling out and highlighting. So, from time to time I’ll be doing that, especially with wedding invites and announcements as we head into high season.

This extensive invitation suite used the cardinal as a central motif. To avoid an overload of red, we tried to balance the use of the color so that it served as a visual and textural (rather than a symbolic) anchor (and I suppose, in that case, it’d be an albatross… note to self: don’t mix metphors).

With the exception of the envelopes, all of the pieces were printed on 300gsm Copperplate, a fantastic mould-made paper from Hahnemühle that takes impression nicely and feels supple in the hand. And to balance the red ink, we used a rich black—Pantone’s Black 5, which has a nice build with a healthy dose of rubine red, helping to soften the stab of straight black ink.

Especially pleasing, and I think especially successful, was the two-color work on the cardinal. Check out the closeup below—the feather texture almost jumps off the page. All in all, a nice find in the archives. Here are some shots of the entire set:

Business cards are a staple for many letterpress printers, and we’re no exception. Given the dearth of good design when looking at the overall spectrum of business cards, I always enjoy working unique elements into these jobs. I printed this card last year when I was a partner at Cultural Operations with my friends Justin and Brian (now at Pencil + Paper and Cultural Operations, respectively). Our client had a limited budget, so we designed a simple card with some unique voice in two colorways. The edge drilling serves as a defacto arrow, leading the eye into the card, reinforced in the center of the card by a custom bracket—a subtle duplication of the same idea, once physically (in the shaping of the left hand side), once in print. Interesting about this piece too, is its illustration of a letterpress flood:printing large solids like these via letterpress is extremely difficult and, even when printed to perfection, will always show a bit of spotchiness or graininess. There are of course tips and tricks to getting the most out of a letterpress flood, but this graininess is inherent to the process, and gives character to the overall tone of a piece.

Having started this blog later in my letterpress career than I’d have liked, I’m going to periodically post items about jobs that I completed in the not-so-and-sometimes-quite-distant past. This simple piece was a DVD cover I designed and printed for my father-in-law’s 80th birthday celebration last year. Not being a fan of the jewel case, I opted for the utilitarian look & feel of chipboard & some old wood type. The outer cover is printed in a deboss (letterpress impression without any ink), and the information on the inner verso was laserprinted on kraft paper and affixed with a tasteful steel clip. I affixed the DVD with an adhesive foam post, which is quite handy, and I’m trying to come up with some other uses.All in all, this made for a tasteful presentation that fit the recipient much better than a plastic case or even a glossy white cardstock cover. While the chipboard will wear down and fade with age, stains, tears, fingerprints and dogears equal gravitas—an embodied story that, I believe, trumps any attempt at eternal preservation.

As many letterpress printers do, I’ve accumulated quite an array of old photoengravings, cuts, ornaments, dingbats and visual oddities over the years. And most of the time, this stuff just sits in cases, probably never to see the light of day again. So, I thought that I would print these from time to time, scan them, clean them up a bit, and then offer them to whomever might want them via free downloads on this blog.

So, here’s the first in the series. This particular image comes from an old type specimen book I uncovered in a used book store in Georgetown (CO) a few years ago… a fascinating and interesting read which I’ll write about in the future. In the back of the book are page after page of images offered up for sale by the type foundry to their printshop clientele. These printers would purhcase, store and then use the photoengravings for their own customers—in this case, dentists, toothpaste manufacturers, halloween toy cobblers, etc.

Click here to download a .zip file that includes .jpeg, hi resolution .tiff, and .eps versions of the file.

Happy Monday!

Hot off a freezing cold press, these letterpress printed reply envelopes brighten up an otherwise frigid day here in Boulder. Part of a larger destination wedding I’ve already written about, these envelopes incorporate the retro airplane motif to tie in the idea of travel. I’ve got larger photos, including a closeup right after the jump.